In Memoriam: Bill Walton

(Optional Musical Accompaniment to This Post.)

During an Oregon / Washington Pac-12 Basketball game on ESPN in 2019, color commentator Bill Walton claimed to have been in “Ghostbusters,” causing confounded play-by-play man Dave Pasch to wonder what character Walton had played in Ivan Reitman’s 1984 comedy. But Walton did not play a character, though he very much was in the movie, it turned out, not just telling tall tales, glimpsed briefly and serendipitously in the background of a closing credit shot as himself. That is how the Hall of Fame basketball player is billed in virtually every movie in which he appears on IMDb, from “Ghostbusters” to “Forget Paris” to “Celtic Pride” to “He Got Game” to “Uncle Drew”: as Bill Walton. After all, who on earth could Bill Walton have played other than himself? If Bill Walton played Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark would still come through as the Free Spirit of San Diego, less concerned with the possibility of drinking hot blood than covering himself in dirt from Temecula*. 

Bill Walton in the background of Ghostbusters, grinning like he’s calling Cal / Stanford in the Pac-12 Tournament quarterfinals. 

Bill Walton was a basketball player, first, though perhaps not foremost, a winner of two NCAA titles with UCLA and two NBA titles, one with Portland, one with Boston, revolutionizing the position of center with his agility and dexterity and forecasting a slew of so-called NBA unicorns to come. In truth, Walton as a basketball player is mostly lost to me. Though I must have seen him play in his final years with the Boston Celtics in the mid-80s, I have no memory of it, learning about him more from David Halberstam’s essential “The Breaks of the Game” and in back issues of Sports Illustrated. The latter deemed his performance in the 1973 NCAA Championship Game where he scored 44 points by sinking 21 of 22 shots and snaring 13 rebounds as a slight case of being superhuman. That single missed shot always felt to me less unfortunate than cosmically fitting, a winking nod to human fallibility. Indeed, Walton’s body would prove fallible too as he struggled to stay healthy in his professional career amid problems with his back, hands, feet, ankles, what have you got.

Walton was not just a revolutionary where basketball was concerned. He conscientiously objected to playing on the 1972 Summer Olympics American Basketball team in protest of the Vietnam War, was friends with the radical sports activist Jack Scott (which is how Walton became slightly entangled in the Patty Hearst saga), and became the face of anti-war dissent at UCLA, even getting arrested for occupying a campus administration building. Eventually, in the later years of his sportscasting career, he would settle in the public imagination as a loveable bohemian in tie-dye and sunglasses flashing courtside peace symbols. It was safer and easier to think of him that way, after all, than as a full-bore radical, but flashes of his leftist belief system would still occasionally emerge. 

I first got to know Walton through that second act sportscasting career after his chronic injuries forced him to retire from playing the game. Irreverent and unmerciful, he was tailor-made for the role. What I remember most about Shaquille O’Neal setting the NCAA Tournament record for blocks in a game in 1992 is less Shaq’s 11 rejections than Walton not praising his fellow big man but excoriating him for blocking the shots out of bounds rather than keeping them in play to provide his team a chance in transition. That kind of contrarianism was not just limited to his analysis but his whole broadcasting style, eschewing the medium’s preferred concise sentences for extravagant run-ons instead, and dropping myriad cultural and literary references that frequently left his announcing partners scratching their heads. He once quoted Lewis Carroll from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by deeming an NBA playoff series as curiouser and curiouser, a line I have only ever been able to hear in Walton’s voice ever after. 

If Walton’s wrecked body forced him out of basketball, it eventually forced him out of broadcasting too, leading to a mind-bending dark period in his life where, as he wrote in his autobiography, the pain was so unyielding and unbearable that life was virtually unlivable, often leaving him lying on the floor for days at a time, contemplating suicide. A 2009 spine surgery, though, saved his life by ending his suffering. In returning to television by broadcasting Pac-12 college basketball games for ESPN, it wasn’t that a new Bill Walton emerged so much as he ceased playing the role of a sports commentator and just started commentating as himself. He did not expound on the games in front of him so much as he effused good vibrations, a little like being in the company of Alec Baldwin’s character on “Friends” if that character had been a Deadhead. Walton always espoused a hippie ethos, but it took on a whole new context in the wake of his physical salvation, transforming each game he called into a two-hour fount of loquacious gratitude. 

Though Walton seemed generally beloved by the end of his life, this style of commentary had its detractors, criticizing him for focusing as much on flights of fancy as on the game and the players. There was some truth in this, but it’s also true that people who talk about sports for a living tend to live in a “small, constricted world” to quote Defector’s Ray Ratto talking about the glorious time in 2021 when Walton predicted five teams would advance to the Final Four. Walton’s worldview was always bigger than predictions, statistics, and takes, and post-spinal surgery, it became infinite. To him, each and every basketball game was a celebration of life, and in his later years, each and every broadcast of a basketball game was too. 

Bill Walton died on Monday May 27, 2024, from cancer. He was 71 but will live forever among the California stars. 

*Maybe this has no place in someone else’s obituary, but given his wandering tendencies, I think Walton would have wanted me to tell it: That is, I once slept overnight in my car in Temecula. The next morning at dawn I drove to Oceanside, parked near the beach, and watched the surfers do their thing in a grey, overcast Pacific while I drank a cup of gas station coffee. It is one of my happiest memories. Maybe there really was something about the dirt in Temecula.

The Fall Guy

There’s a sequence from “The Great Waldo Pepper” (1975) in which Robert Redford’s eponymous Depression-era aviator briefly moonlights as a stuntman in Hollywood, taking hard falls turning him punch drunk, all rendered at a comic pitch. Rather than set the record straight about the stunt people that make so many movies go, 2024’s first big tentpole “The Fall Guy” just wants to give them their due by opting for a comic tone too. The eponymous stuntman Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) might get bumped and bruised, even attain one significant injury, but nothing truly hurts, epitomized in a scene where upon crashing through a window, he shakes the broken glass from his hood, drolly waits a beat, and then shakes out some more. No, in concluding with an end credits sequence showing the real-life stuntmen for the movie’s star who is playing the stuntman for a movie star (Aaron-Taylor Johnson), director David Leitch, a former stuntman and stunt coordinator himself, has composed a meta love letter to his chosen profession, and fine by me. What “The Fall Guy” lacks in levity, it more than makes up for with liveliness, like “Bowfinger” but if rather than being a movie about making an action movie “Bowfinger” had just been an action movie.

A prologue introduces Colt doing the dirty work for Tom Ryder (Johnson), and in a happy relationship with camera operator Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), at the top, meaning he can only fall, literally and figuratively when a stunt goes wrong, leaving him severely injured, and struggling to recover emotionally as much as physically. Eventually, he is re-enlisted by producer Gail Meyer, played with great glee by Hannah Waddingham in the key of the recurring Diet Coke in her hand, overcaffeinated and high-strung, to help Jody finish her first movie as a director, a western horror sci-fi hybrid Metalstorm, on location in Australia. Colt helps by getting back behind the wheel of a stunt car, yes, but also by masquerading as a gumshoe to find Metalstorm’s leading man, Tom, who has gone missing, his disappearance threatening to derail the production.

That is considerable plot, two movies at once, almost, and though “The Fall Guy” was written by one person, Drew Pearce, it still emits a by-committee feel, not confusing, exactly, but patchy, not inexorably building bit by bit but feeling both made up on the fly and threatening to unravel. In its way, though, this ragged and wild sensation becomes reflective of the movie within a movie, which is all the time threatening to come undone, not just from Tom going MIA but from various moviemaking snaggles. There is a bravura single take in which the camera circles and tracks with Jody as all manner of people on the Metalstorm production come to her with questions, a comic portrait of a movie director as a kind of trail guide keeping the expedition on task, ultimately as deft in negotiating her own task as Colt is at making a speedboat escape with his hands literally tied behind his back.

Though Colt and Jody can feel underwritten, their impeccable wardrobes more thought out than their backstories, these two gifted performers, nevertheless, provide just enough immediacy to individual moments and their overall relationship to make it work. Gosling deploys his skill for self-deprecation into a quiet commentary on a guy who can’t quite bring himself to confess his own pain. Blunt’s own flair for indignant deadpan, meanwhile, goes a long way in helping sell the push and pull. When Colt cries along to Taylor Swift in his truck one night, it might be a concession to the zeitgeist, but man, when Jody appears at his window, Blunt’s unamused facial expression seems to dress down the zeitgeist as much as it dresses down Colt. And though “The Fall Guy” leans a little too heavily on montages to convey their rekindling romance, these montages tend to go together with making the movie, portraying them as collaborators as much as romantic partners, artistic expression and love going hand-in-hand.

What Pearce’s script lacks, it ameliorates with how its main character’s very particular set of professional skills amusingly intertwines with his improvisatory private investigative work, essentially taking the old critic aphorism about a plot existing to string stunts get together and making it come cheekily alive. “The Fall Guy” sets up myriad tools of the trade and then pays them off, none more ingeniously or hilariously than a prop gun, which for all the winning special effects, just goes to show that sometimes it’s the littlest tricks that resonate the loudest. Leitch honors his own “John Wick” rule by repeatedly allowing us to see stunts in full frames rather than chopped up in the editing room, and though there are some set pieces at night, there are just as many in the light of day, rejoicing in what it has been dreamt up rather than obfuscating. And speaking of collaboration, “The Fall Guy” concludes with a stunt that brings in the entire stunt team and ties the whole movie together, action-oriented proof that one man cannot do it all on his own. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Road Warrior (1981)

“Mad Max 2” was renamed “The Road Warrior” at the behest of Warner Bros. for its American release lest any jingoists in the audience unfamiliar with the low budget “Mad Max 1” from Down Under get confused. The name change though was not entirely out of place given how “The Road Warrior” stood on its own as something like the B-side to the original’s A-side, or maybe more appropriately by virtue of their dueling tones, the out-of-order A-side to the original’s B-side. The first one just sort of starts, barely laying out its world, renders its cavalcade of cars as important as the humans, and features the eponymous cop (Mel Gibson) with a family who becomes an avenging lone wolf, mirroring the movie’s full-bore descent into nihilism. The second one opens with a brief prologue explaining how we got here and emphasizes humanity, echoed in Max, who begins as a savage lone wolf and becomes something closer to a traditional hero. If that means “The Road Warrior” can’t help but feel more conventional, it is, nevertheless, still invigorating for its world-building, the concise manner in which conveys character and information, and how even if Max transforms into the noble combatant of the (American) title, there is something about the character and the performance that remains resistant to such nobility throughout.

So, how did we get here? Because of WWIII, of course, one caused by a fuel shortage and failed diplomacy. “Their leaders talked and talked and talked,” the narrator laments regarding the global conflict fostering “The Road Warrior’s” post-apocalyptic landscape while foreshadowing a movie in which the main character barely talks at all. Though the budget was higher than “Mad Max’s” meager one, the sequel still feels agreeably spare in its design, taking full advantage of myriad desolate landscapes to create a place that feels both humongous and small. The world has been reduced to virtually nothing but a highway stretching in all directions, meaning the world has also been reduced purely to the consumption of what gasoline can be foraged, men and their machines, which is sort of why the lack of a real female presence in “The Road Warrior” feels apt, like this really is what the world would come to if dumb dudes were left to their own devices; strap on leather and hockey masks and get in fights. The plot turns on talk of some paradise to the north, but this is represented exclusively through a cheap looking postcard, a triumph of ten cent production design, as if even during the end of the world people are trying to sell you a timeshare.

 
The plot involves a refinery in the middle of nowhere pumping out precious fuel that is desired by a band of violent scavengers. Max discovers this refinery through the Gyro Captain (Bruce Spence), a clever character having fun with narrative tropes in so much as he spends the whole movie trying to install himself as Max’s sidekick with Max wordlessly holding out against this at every turn. At first, we see this brewing conflict between the refinery’s inhabitants and their tormentors as Max does, that is, from high above on a cliff and far away, underscoring his content to stay out of it. Until his attempts to get some of their fuel for himself wind up getting him very much involved, at first taken prisoner inside the refinery and then convincing them to let him go steal a big rig to bring back to help bust them and all their gas out in the celebrated climactic chase with a literal smashing conclusion. Each decision Max makes, though, is painted as being about his own survival as much as a sense of decency, evoked in Gibson’s performance, taking all his emotional cues from Max eating dog food, reducing the character to nothing more, really, than an animal. He saves the day, even if he doesn’t quite see the light, dragged toward it instead.

I.S.S.

“I.S.S.” stands for International Space Station, which is where all of Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s 2024 thriller is set, in orbit 250 miles above earth. A symbol of collaborative unity after the end of the Cold War, a title card tells us, this space base demonstrated how one-time geopolitical rivals could get along, meaning that it’s only a matter of time before everything in “I.S.S.” goes wrong and puts is three astronauts and three cosmonauts at one another’s throats. That comes in the form of a war erupting back on the home planet between the two countries, both of whom immediately message their respective countrymen and countrywomen in space to claim the station in the name of their respective flag. It’s a crack set-up that, disappointingly, frustratingly, goes nowhere in terms of philosophy, politics, or drama.

“I.S.S.” is predominantly seen through the eyes of Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose), a biologist cum marine cum astronaut who has blasted into space to run experiments with live mice intended to prove, well, I haven’t the foggiest. The intention of the tests proves less important than the result, that is, frightened from being weightless, the mice mutilate each other overnight, scientific observation as an omen, forecasting the crew-on-crew violence to come just as Kira’s scant backstory of keeping to herself becomes an omen too, juxtaposed against Weronika (Masha Mashkova) stressing the need to stick together. This is plot disguised as character, in other words, rather than the other way around. And that’s fine, quite honestly, as I tend to enjoy so many setups sprinkled all over the narrative like breadcrumbs. But just as American Commander Barrett (Chris Messina) mentioning to Kira that if you don’t hear the hum of the life support system, that means trouble, fails to pay off with any kind of flourish, neither do any of the other setups, betraying a thriller with virtually no pep in its payoffs, a storytelling sin.

That sin might have been forgivable if “I.S.S.” had sought to be more of a political thriller than thriller-thriller. For a moment, you think it might when Kira’s first night aboard the space station ends with the sextet belting out “Wind of Change.” That 1991 Scorpions ballad became as much an emblem of the Cold War’s end as much as the space station, suggesting a movie in which the emergent hostilities will trigger the beginning of Cold War II. Except, as one of the cosmonauts says, they don’t talk politics, and neither does “I.S.S.” In rendering the personality traits of its characters as mere harbingers of the plot, they are also stripped of any real political or even national identity, and so, undercutting any genuine sense of such stakes when war breaks out. And if this is all meant to reduce them to savagery, men and women as animals a la the mice, the filmmaking is too polite to evoke such savagery. Though you sense significant work went into filming in an ostensible zero gravity environment, its disorienting effect never translates. The most potent images are of the Earth on fire below, a striking juxtaposition of beauty and terror never echoed in the movie itself, leaving one to wonder if the more interesting movie is down there somewhere.

Letting Go

Like many people born in the summer of “Star Wars” in 1977, and who grew up playing “Star Wars” with friends, and buying the action figures and the bubble bath, and staying up late to watch “The Empire Strikes Back” as the NBC Sunday Night Movie of the Week, as a fledgling adult in the summer of 1999 I was in a tizzy to see the long-awaited prequel “The Phantom Menace.” And because I was assistant managing a multiplex at the time, I first watched Episode I a couple days before its official May 19th, 1999, release, at midnight with just a few other managers. No regular employees were allowed; it was restricted access only. I literally had to step over people camped along the sidewalk for the first showing to get inside and was verboten from letting it slip why I was there. At some point during the movie, after what I think might have been the line about how you can’t stop change any more than you can stop the suns from setting, I exchanged a look with another manager, the same sort of look we might have exchanged during, like, “The Mod Squad” a couple weeks earlier. Digital effects aside, that’s basically what “The Phantom Menace” was, as good as “The Mod Squad.” After it ended, that same manager and I stepped back over the people in line and went to his car. He paused before opening his door, cast his eyes toward the devotees settling in for a night of sleeping on the cement, and said, with a genuine touch of melancholy, “Those poor bastards don’t even know.”

For its 25th anniversary I am not interested in making an aesthetic appraisal of “The Phantom Menace”; for the purposes of this post, consider my negative opinion of it strictly as a work of art written in stone. What always bothered me, though, both at the time of its release and in the years since as it has been reclaimed in some quarters as supposedly better than its reputation, were the assumptions that people who did not like it had an agenda, or held a grudge, or suffered from unfairly outsized expectations. Indeed, to observe the 25th anniversary of “The Phantom Menace,” the Roger Ebert site recently reposted its namesake’s original review and I was horrified to rediscover the first paragraph is an in-advance scolding of all the naysayers like me, that if we didn’t appreciate it for what it was then we couldn’t even appreciate the stars in the sky, or something. Reading that review, man, made me want to take up figurative arms like Gene Siskel on the other side of the aisle. “‘The Phantom Menace’ isn’t Orion, Roger, it’s the lights in the parking lot at Ruby Tuesday.”

There is considerable history and subsequent baggage that comes with being a “Star Wars” fan, true, and it’s easy to believe a great many fans of the franchise were and are not being honest with themselves, but Ebert’s positive notice was rife with equivocations and so maybe he wasn’t being entirely honest with himself. The ancient fallacy of assuming me incapable of setting aside my expectations and assessing the movie on its own terms ticked me off then and it ticks me off now. But letting that hate flow through me, to quote the late great Emperor Palpatine, is what tends to go hand-in-hand, anymore, with being a “Star Wars” fan: everything is taken personally, resulting in the kind of fan toxicity that has become a modern pop culture scourge, and which led me to detach from “Star Wars” as much as the mediocre prequels and subsequent sequels themselves.

I want to be real clear here and say that George Lucas did not destroy my childhood. Leaving aside the should-be self-evident observation that a movie having any real effect on my upbringing is ridiculous, those memories I have of playing “Star Wars” with friends, of buying the action figures and the bubble bath, of staying up late to watch “The Empire Strikes Back” as the NBC Sunday Night Movie of the Week all still happened despite whatever happened later. Besides, there is the movie itself, the first one, which has always meant the most to me, and which, in revisiting the first 30 minutes or so of recently, I was not surprised to find for the umpteenth time still slaps, to use the parlance of our times, imagery and editing and music linked in that way that continues to awe me independent of everything else. And as I get older, and my memory banks begin to deteriorate, “Star Wars” itself will exist as the last document of what it all meant. 

That half-hour of “Star Wars” I watched was the Project 4K77 version, the one in which a group of guerilla fans remastered the original 1977 cut, ridding it of Lucas’s myriad digital and narrative add-ons over the years, seeking to restore the real thing everyone like me grew up on and fell in love with to 4K visual fidelity. This post isn’t about the aesthetics of “The Phantom Menace” and it isn’t about the ethical or moral implications of this remastering, though it’s notable how Lucas seeking not just to alter the original cut but to actively suppress it would appear to go against his own words regarding film preservation, if you consider, as he would seem to, film preservation to be not just about protecting the film negatives of old movies but their original presentations, treating such a cut, as The New York Times’ Jody Rosen wrote of the masters lost in the 2008 Universal Music fire, as “the thing itself.” And if the thing itself is what endures as the last real memory for those of us who grew up with “Star Wars” only to see that memory essentially erased before our very eyes, I sympathize with the fans who don’t want to lose it even if I find something equally interesting and revealing in Lucas treating his masterpiece like a palimpsest.

Almost 50 years after it was filmed, the abandoned remnants of some original “Star Wars” sets remain scattered across Tunisia, standing in for Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine, like the little igloo in deep in the Sahara representing the character’s family home. Given the remote location and harsh climate, it’s hard to believe that it’s lasted this long, helped along by some “Star Wars” fans who specifically sought to preserve it, though you can bet that eventually the desert will reclaim it. It is reminiscent of the original trilogy itself, with Lucas as a kind of manmade Mother Nature, eroding his own creations, and reminds me of my own relationship with the seminal space opera, once alive and immediate but having gradually worn away over time. At one point in my life, movies and “Star Wars” were synonymous, but even by the summer of 1999, it had already ceased to matter to me as much as the movies themselves. And so, when “Star Wars” stopped being good, I didn’t really have a reason to need it anymore.

Friday's Old Fashioned: An Autumn's Tale (1987)

“An Autumn’s Tale” begins with Jennifer (Cherie Chung) on a plane from Hong Kong to New York where she is set to attend college and catch back up with her boyfriend, Vincent (Danny Chan). En route, she flashes back to scenes with her family, going through assorted totems and photographs, which they talk about not in terms of the past but the present, and the future. In other words, Jennifer is planning to simply transport her Asian life to America. Upon arrival, however, she is greeted by distant relative Samuel Pang, aka Sampan, aka The Figurehead, aka Figgy (Chow Yun-fat) who gives her a ride home in his beat-up car that transforms into a comical on-the-road confrontation with a motorist that cuts him off, leaving Jennifer cowering and screaming in the passenger seat. Welcome to America! Soon, she discovers Vincent is cheating on her, leaving her alone, poor, in a ramshackle Chinatown apartment that would have a view of the Brooklyn Bridge if the window wasn’t boarded up. In one sequence she moves through various pedestrians on a graffiti-filled sidewalk as if they are not even there, that feeling every big city dweller has known, when you’re somehow so deep inside your own mind nothing around you registers and yet you are as far away from yourself as you have ever felt.

Eventually, Jennifer is made to feel at home by Figgy, brought to vivid life by Chow Yun-fat as a loudmouth who nevertheless loudly effuses love. When Figgy happens upon Jennifer at a small Chinese restaurant eating nothing but an egg sandwich, he sits down and orders them both a feast, embodying the idea of Chinese community forged through food. And that is what “An Autumn’s Tale” is about above all, more than their fledgling romance, and even their respective personal crises, friendship and community and how that helps sustain an immigrant’s experience. It’s telling how despite an American setting, most of the movie is in Chinese, suggesting how Jennifer and Figgy make a place for themselves in America, and how that melting pot sensation is not only distinctly American but distinctly New York. I kept hearing the old intro to the Late Show with David Letterman in my head: “From New York, the greatest city in the world.” Indeed, “An Autumn’s Tale” is an immigrant movie, but it is also a New York movie, as much as any Woody Allen joint, one that continually splits the difference between reality and fairytale, between Figgy’s broken-down beater and a handsome cab, between the Mets and the Yankees. (In one scene, Figgy sports a Mets cap, delineating his allegiance.) And if Jennifer can’t see the Brooklyn Bridge from her window, then Figgy just paints that cable-stayed suspension connector between Manhattan and Brooklyn and puts the painting in front of the window instead.

Wanna Feel Old?

Physically, I imagine, getting old is no picnic no matter the era and quality of medicine and medical technology; bodies and minds are always going to break down and deteriorate. But I do wonder if emotionally getting older used to be easier, even just a few decades ago, before everybody in the world knew that when “Cocoon” was released in movie theaters on June 21, 1985, Wilford Brimley, despite playing a senior citizen in a retirement home, was 50 years, 9 months, and 6 days old. Would getting older be easier if I did not know that tomorrow Kristen Wiig (!) was going to cross the so-called Brimley/Cocoon Line, becoming the same age as Brimley when he starred in “Cocoon,” and would getting older be easier if I did not also know that Tempestt Bledsoe, Vanessa freaking Huxtable, passed the Brimley/Cocoon Line a couple weeks ago (!!), both of which make me feel like Private James Francis Ryan morphing from young man to old man in an instant in “Saving Private Ryan,” or elderly Rose Dawson in “Titanic” saying It’s been 84 years,” two images remade into memes for people on social media to express themselves when life seems to have passed them by. So, I try not to think about my life passing me by, but its ever-encroaching impermanence always rears its head in the most unexpected ways.

Dermot Mulroney is an actor I don’t think about all that much. But, you know, I saw him in “Young Guns,” back when I was in fifth grade, and I saw him opposite Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz in “My Best Friend’s Wedding” in 1997, right before I set off on my star-cross’d journey to college, and I saw him opposite Sarah Jessica Parker and Claire Danes in “The Family Stone” in 2005, not long after I moved to Chicago, the only movie I ever saw at The Esquire, which has now been closed for almost 20 years, and then, holy cow, there was Mulroney in “Anyone but You” (reviewed yesterday) as the dad of Sydney Sweeney, and M. Emmet Walsh, the guy who played Mulroney’s dad in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” died a couple months ago at the age of 88, and if I had been standing, I would have to sit down, and did you know Dermot Mulroney crossed the Brimley/Cocoon Line ten years ago when I had only known my future wife for five months?

Anyone but You

Given the lack of modern romantic comedies, when a semi-high-profile new one is released, it tends to be viewed either as a potential savior or a failed deliverer. Refreshingly, Will Gluck’s “Anyone but You,” released theatrically last December and now on Netflix, lands in-between. If it had been made in the 90s, it would have been a late April release, before the bigger name rom coms of May and June. Indeed, it is not especially fresh nor insightful, and most critically, fails to truly build out its own world. But it is also conveyed and performed with enough energy and enthusiasm to make you enjoy its hoary twists, if not occasionally believe them, and most crucially, swoon over its stars. It even turns the Sydney Opera House into the Eiffel Tower, in a manner of speaking, a landmark of love, which as an Eiffel-Tower-in-Movies enthusiast, warmed my heart.

Those stars are Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, playing Bea and Ben, respectively, who Meet Cute at a coffee shop by pretending to be husband and wife under semi-convoluted circumstances and functioning as a good indicator of what’s to come. Bea accidentally getting her pants wet from the bathroom sink might be an ancient call from the Rom Com Playbook, but Sweeney sells her character air drying them with such desperately comic vigor that it works in spite of itself. Bea and Ben spend the night together, seeming to fall in love, only to have a misunderstanding turn them into sworn enemies instead. Their hostility turns troublesome when Bea’s sister Halle (Hadley Robinson) becomes engaged to Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), sister of Ben’s best friend Pete (GaTa), meaning these adversaries must try and play nice when they travel to Australia for the wedding, setting in motion all manner of romantic about-faces. 

The screenplay by Gluck and Ilana Wolpert is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, meaning various friends and family members try to play matchmaker for Bea and Ben. Eventually, a fed-up Bea and Ben get everyone off their backs by pretending to be in love, a plot detail I appreciated, turning the fake dating trope inside-out, embodying not just how Gluck and Wolpert constantly refresh the plot to keep us engaged but the movie’s overall spirited sensation. That spirit is just as acutely captured in the editing, both moment to moment in the screwball repartee between its leads and overall, ensuring an almost two-hour movie never feels too long. Eh, at least until the requisite downturn, that is, when its lack of world-building finally catches up.

It’s strange to say but the most striking evidence of the larger world in “Anyone but You” is when Bea and Ben “do a ‘Titanic’” during a Sydney Harbour pre-wedding cruise by stepping up to the boat’s railing and spreading their arms. This is neither conveyed nor played like mere meta rom com commentary but merely two people who know this movie from pop culture and are having fun with it. Otherwise, who Bea and Ben are as people never comes across. He’s in finance, I guess, conveyed entirely via one brief cutaway to a stock chart on a computer screen, while what defines Bea is not knowing what she wants to be, which ultimately feels less like a character trait than the movie’s own lack of a better idea. All this is amplified by Halle and Claudia’s relationship never becoming the reflection of Bea and Ben’s a great script would have made it while the latter’s emergent exes (Darren Barnet and Charlee Fraser) are just beautiful-looking impediments, all of this causing a lack of genuine drama in the homestretch. I did appreciate Bryan Brown as Claudia’s father in something approximating the Antonio role of Much Ado, playing his part of romantic deception with comic relish, which underlines Sweeney and Powell as “Anyone but You’s” preeminent quality. 

The screenplay schemes ways to get them repeatedly into their skivvies, or into nothing at all, allowing us to ogle them but ogle them tastefully, an acknowledgement that more than the striking Australian scenery, this is what we paid (our subscription to Netflix) to see. That is not to sell them short as performers. Powell is better evoking his character’s air despite their being next to nothing on the page, a bro with a big heart, than Sweeney. Indeed, her turn is a little weird, which I mean, mostly, as a compliment. Because if she begins by trying to echo the character as loosely written, cheerily scatterbrained, as the script transitions them to animosity and Bea becomes less and less defined, Sweeney resorts to her innate Sweeney-ness, marked by impeccably withering vocal fry and facial expressions. If that’s a ding on Sydney Sweeney the actor, it’s a compliment to Sydney Sweeney the movie star, and I’m fine with the latter winning out. It provides Bea and Ben a necessarily balanced contrast paving the way for a legitimately enthralling push and pull. You know they’re going to end up together, but when she tempts him with her eyes during their mid-movie dance, you’ll swear, anything might just go.

Notes on Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman, upon recently receiving the American Film Institute Award for Lifetime Achievement.

A confession: the first time I ever watched a Nicole Kidman movie was because I thought she was cute. The movie was “Billy Bathgate,” and so this was 1991, and so I was 14 years old, and so, please, cut me at least a little slack. I wanted to see Robert Benton’s adaptation of the E.L. Doctorow novel because one year out from “Goodfellas” every idiot 14-year-old boy was obsessed with mob movies, but also because every commercial they ran for “Billy Bathgate” during college football games and primetime television showed Nicole Kidman at least once and, man, was she pretty. My embarrassing shallowness, however, was evocative of the shallow, and dense, way Hollywood promoted Kidman in the 1990s. The industry saw her as a movie star, but never understood what that meant, never determined what persona they were selling, sort of mingling generic beautiful woman with Tom Cruise’s Other Half, emblemized in forgettable projects like “Malice” (1993) and “Days of Thunder” (1990). There was not a persona to sell, however, because even then Kidman was what she is now, an actor, subsuming herself in roles rather than standing apart from them. She carried her half of “Dead Calm” (1989) as capably as Sam Neill carried his, demonstrated her future propensity for total commitment in “To Die For” (1995), and in “Batman Forever” (1995), quite frankly, went above and beyond the call of duty. Well before Christopher Nolan invested his Dark Knight trilogy with seriousness, Kidman was helping her movie earn its PG-13 rating by conveying (earmuffs!) just how seriously her character wanted to fuck Batman.

If there was a single moment when the broader populace truly became aware of Kidman’s immense ability it was when she donned a prosthetic nose to play Virginia Wolff in “The Hours” (2002), underlined in her winning the Oscar for Best Actress. Kidman is almost always a transformative actor, whether she is changing her appearance or not, but transformation is so much more conspicuous when it’s literal. It was more than that, though, as the invaluable culture writer Anne Helen Petersen wrote in 2017 when assessing Kidman’s career; in playing the part, Kidman “got ugly...Her performance of dowdiness, in other words, is made remarkable by just how unnatural it must have been.” By not being beautiful, Kidman was “proving” she could act for the doofs who somehow did not already realize she could. “With ‘The Hours’ (Kidman) takes another step away from her movie-star persona and firmly becomes an actor playing a role,” Andrew O’Hehir wrote for Salon, proving Petersen’s point even as he gives Kidman a rave, “rather than a celebrity playing herself under a different name.” He continued: “For an actress to give up her face -- her most marketable commodity -- even for one role, is a startling decision.”

In essence, O’Hehir was writing that Kidman had assumed a mask, but the truth was, Kidman had been donning masks her whole career. Emily Nussbaum noted as much for The New Yorker in 2017, writing that Kidman offered not “transparency, (but) a different gift: she can wear a mask and simultaneously let you feel what it’s like to hide behind it.” Though she infuses roles with a sense of her own individual ideas about the person she is playing, like essentially imagining Lucille Ball in “Being the Ricardos” as Michael Jordan of “The Last Dance,” Kidman is not playing herself, the crucial delineation. Rather, she conceals herself, a kind of Kidman Kabuki, and like that ancient school of Japanese art, she uses such artifice to transmit emotions of who she is playing directly to the audience.

Yet, in the last few years, a curious thing has happened. In our strange present, where the very idea of what constitutes a movie has become muddled, and big screens and small screens and all the screens in-between have figuratively blurred to the point where it can be difficult to tell them apart, few have managed to carve out a distinct presence across all these spectrums like Kidman. Not just in movies and TV, but social media too, and not just by starting her own Instagram account, but in how her work has been harvested for TikTok and memes. This includes clips of her past roles, of course, like her time-stopping close-up in “The Stepford Wives,” and even her various reactions on talk shows and at awards shows, but I’m thinking even more specifically. I’m thinking, of course, about the AMC Theatres commercial in which Kidman was enlisted in 2021 as an ambassador for the movie multiplex chain to help implore the public to return to movie theaters after the pre-vaccine days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

This commercial has been parodied endlessly, from Olivia Rodrigo on TikTok to Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars to Morgan Freeman at Kidman’s recent AFI Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony. Crucially, though, Kidman herself is not resorting to self-parody. She is Pure Camp, in the way that Susan Sontag famously saw it, exaggerated, fantastic, passionate, and naive, so deadly serious in effusing such religious grandiosity over the act of going to the movies that it is impossible take seriously. But it’s more. Because she is not playing a character, she is playing herself, except in quotation marks. “It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman,’” Sontag wrote. And it is not Kidman, but “Kidman.” It is Nicole Kidman finally becoming a movie star by creating her own persona without, still, having to give her real self away.

What Kind of Big Screen Bruce Do We Want?

In the year 2000, Bruce Springsteen appeared briefly in the Stephen Frears-directed adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel “High Fidelity” not so much as himself as a vision of the main character (John Cusack). And as much as I enjoyed “Blinded by the Light” (2019), and the 2013 fan service documentary “Springsteen & I” too, Planet Earth Poet Laureate’s cameo in “High Fidelity” essentially summarized in less than 60 seconds what both those movies took their entire run times to say, that for Springsteen fans, he exists as a spiritual sherpa. And though I’m biased as a longtime resident of E Street, it has always seemed to me that’s all we ever really needed of Bruce on the big screen. He, himself, saw the speciousness of the whole potential exercise back in 1983 when he recorded the cheeky rockabilly “Born in the U.S.A.” outtake “TV Movie.” What, did we really want him to get “Rocketman-ed,” or “Bohemian Rhapsody-ed,” or “Walk the Line-d?” “You might get to thinking you’re ahead of the game / but when you break it all down / it all comes out the same,” sang James McMurtry in “Painting by Numbers,” essentially describing the majority of musician biopics, mere vessels for their actors to get Academy Award nominations, sticking to a formula so rote that “Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story” took it apart element by element.

In 2017, there was some vague news about a movie called “Asbury Park,” set in the Jersey beach town and around its preeminent rock club, the Stone Pony, where Springsteen got his start that, back then at least, seemed to suggest Springsteen would play a supporting role. That was intriguing, not only not making a Springsteen biopic but in a movie about Springsteen’s old stomping ground, keeping him to the side, maybe like a Wolfman Jack in “American Graffiti,” looming large without being the star of the show. As stated, though, that was 2017, and in visiting that prospective film’s entry on IMDb, one discovers that it remains “In Development,” left, perhaps, to hike the streets up in the sky*. (*Obscure Springsteen reference.) If, however, “Asbury Park” is not the answer to our unconventional Springsteen biopic dreams, then perhaps “Deliver Me from Nowhere” is.

I only just learned that Scott Cooper, who wrote and directed Jeff Bridges in “Crazy Heart,” is slated to helm a Bruce Springsteen movie with “The Bear’s” Jeremy Allen White reportedly in talks to star as The Boss himself. Forget whether White may or may not make a credible Bruce (can he do a hoarse laugh?). That’s of less interest to me than the idea supporting the movie and the idea, thankfully, does not appear to be a biopic, or at least, not a traditional biopic, based as it is on Warren Zanes’s book of the same title about Springsteen recording his sixth studio album “Nebraska,” the one he recorded entirely on a 4-track recorder in his New Jersey bedroom, and that also, more or less, is when he conceived of the ensuing “Born in the U.S.A.” too. This is an idea that gives the potential movie crucial focus and real potential. (It is also possible, I concede, that this movie begins with Bruce sitting down at the 4-track recorder in his New Jersey bedroom, triggering the first flashback of many, a la aforementioned Dewey Cox, who “has to think about his entire life before he plays.”)

The involvement of Springsteen himself and his longtime manager Jon Landau might be cause for concern, at least in terms of Cooper having the room to honest and unmerciful, but maybe their involvement is just to ensure Cooper has full access to the singer’s catalogue, so “Atlantic City” doesn’t have to be translated into “Ocean City” like “Piece of My Heart” into “Chunk of My Lung.” But overall, I find myself encouraged. It has the potential to function as a companion piece to “Air” (2023), which claimed in words to know what “Born in the U.S.A.” was about even as the movie itself suggested otherwise, just as “Nebraska” and “Born in the U.S.A.” “were two sides of the same coin,” to quote the rock critic Elizabeth Nelson. “The umbrage-filled bluster of one and the quiet violence of the other taken together are a prophetic nightmare vision of a contemporary America, which can’t tell the difference between an execution and a compliment.” 

Nelson saw further than that, even, to “a relationship between Springsteen and his audience (that) is as moving and unhealthy as rock has ever had on offer,” noting that “‘Nebraska’ was a low confidence vote in a country that simultaneously made him rich and made him doubt everything.” It’s mere wishcasting, especially in a genre where affirmations tend to be what general audiences want more than provocations or questions, but I like imagining a Bruce biopic that rather than reconsecrating the fan relationship one more time might have the guts to hold it up to the light.

Upgraded

The title of Carlson Young’s Amazon Prime rom com literally refers to its aspirant art dealer Ana (Camila Mendes) being upgraded from lowly coach to highfalutin first-class on a flight for a London work trip. Figuratively, though, this upgrade evokes how in the course of the flight she also manages to upgrade her life, telling her handsome fellow first-class passenger William (Archine Renaux) with whom she meets cute that she’s a director rather than mere intern at the renowned New York auction house where she works. Given his mother Catherine (Lena Olin) is an affluent art collector, this unexpected connection causes Ana’s her nascent career to skyrocket in just a few days even as her ruse threatens to cause her nascent career to come crashing down. The studious website Wikipedia deems “Upgraded” a modern retelling of the classic Cinderella story, which, sure, I guess, though given Ana’s deception and her demanding boss Claire (Marisa Tomei), it comes across more like a melding of “The Secret of My Success” (1987) and “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006). The former was a Michael J. Fox 80s comedy that glossed over its own ruthlessness, and though sometimes “Upgraded” does not feel entirely clued in to its own innate critique, that critique becomes visible, nonetheless. 

Ana loves art, as the opening sequence in which she describes the dualities of a Hilma af Clint reprint on her wall evokes, but she is stuck trying to find some way to make an impression on Claire who does not receive such impressions easily. The character of Claire is clearly channeling Meryl Streep channeling Anna Wintour, but Tomei effectively creates her own brand of hauteur, nevertheless. Sizing up her charges in her introductory scene, each double take and observation side-splitting, and Tomei has adopted some sort of French accent that jibes with her last name yet sounds almost Lady Edith Greensly-like, a possible put-on that “Upgraded” never resolves yet informs the movie’s overriding sense of faking it ’til you make it. Ana catches her break by correcting a mistake in the middle of an auction, winning Claire’s approval and the trip to London, though hanging a hapless young colleague out to dry. Mendes plays this with nary a hint of regret, and the movie would have been wise to latch on to that trait rather than the script talking up her character’s insecurity which ultimately comes through less than her ambition. It would have been almost cutthroat, but the movie softens that edge, never daring to push Ana too far toward unlikable.

The most significant issue, however, is that Mendes and Renaux do not have chemistry comparable to Mendes and Olin. And yet, if that causes all the scenes between Ana and William to fall flat, those between Ana and Catherine still sing, a little like a mother and a daughter, or maybe more like a protégé and a mentor, or perhaps more in the vein of two women helping out one another rather than trying to tear one another down, the yang to the yin. And even when Ana’s ruse is mandatorily uncovered, it might make William mad, but not Catherine, respecting the player, if not also the game, epitomizing a movie that essentially argues meritocracy is for suckers with a something like a “Hey, how about that?” smile on its face.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Catch Me If You Can (1989)

Stephen Sommers of “The Mummy” (1999) has not directed a movie since 2013’s trouble-laden Dean Koontz adaptation “Odd Thomas,” possibly bookending a career that also began with some production difficulties. Not to be confused with Steven Spielberg’s 2002 “Catch Me If You Can, 1989’s “Catch Me If You Can” was Sommers’s directorial debut, made for just $800,000 and screened at Cannes where it was apparently snatched up by a studio that contemporary accounts indicate went belly up, leaving the movie orphaned and ultimately released straight to video. A cruel fate, I understand, though given its street racing subject matter, it feels appropriate for a B movie, and I’m honestly disappointed I didn’t discover it years ago as one of those movies our local Fox affiliate would screen on winter Saturday afternoons as counterprogramming to Big Ten basketball games. Speaking of the Big Ten, “Catch Me If You Can” (Stephen’s Version) was filmed in his native Minnesota, in and around St. Cloud. It shows in the vibrant autumn colors and the familiar geography of my many trips to my dad’s Minnesota hometown about two hours southeast of the state’s 12th most populous city. Despite this, and despite filming parts of the movie in Sommers’s actual St. Cloud high school, the setting, it turns out, is not really Minnesota at all.

It has been chronicled ad nauseam that 1980s America was infused with a nostalgia for 1950s America, a nostalgia famously lived out in “Back to the Future” (1985) by having its protagonist literally time travel to the Age of Eisenhower. There is no time travel in “Catch Me If You Can,” but it’s like the 1950s never left, or as if the fetish for them is so extravagant an entire community has agreed to act as if the 1950s never left. Sommers may have deployed a Tangerine Dream score, but the soundtrack is infused with 1950s hits and the Principal (Geoffrey Lewis) has a precious jukebox inside his office on which he plays oldies but goodies over the school PA system, functioning as much like a dee jay as an administrative head, Wolfman Jack as Principal Strickland. Costuming feels like an amalgamation of the two decades, epitomized in semi-bad boy Dylan (Matt Lattanzi), dressed like a 1950s greaser, that aesthetic emphasized in the character’s love of illegal street racing upon which the story turns. Struggling to save her high school from being closed with standard candy bar sales, Class President Melissa (Loryn Locklin) turns to Dylan instead, wagering money from the school treasury on Dylan’s races and winning big, until they cross street racing kingpin Johnny Phatmun (M. Emmet Walsh), and it all goes wrong.

At first, this bizarre mélange feels agreeably surreal. When one student is asked how he earned detention, he replies “Killing a freshman,” and given the prevailing mood, you’re libel to believe him, as if “Catch Me If You Can” has fused like the heightened tone of “Bottoms” with the noir-inflected high school movie “Brick” but if “Brick” had foregone noir for 1950s hot rod movies. Yet, the longer “Catch Me If You Can” goes, the more disappointingly conventional it becomes. It was a debut made for relative peanuts and it’s harsh to be harsh, but it screams of a movie that needed better editing, both moment-to-moment and in the long run, as the pace slackens both ways as it moves along. And as that hour and forty-five minutes gets longer, the movie loses its sense of playfulness and wittiness, taking its clichés with far too straight a face, unable to skewer them, or transcend them, or really make them sing, as a movie having fun with B movies just sort of becomes a B movie.

The Greatest Night in Pop

Rather than watch 1965’s “The Greatest Story Ever Told” on Easter Sunday, I watched “The Greatest Night Pop,” along with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, and a few Friends of the Blog. Our viewing choice was hardly any less apropos if you believe, as some culture writers would, that celebrities are the morally bankrupt modern world’s true religious icons. After all, the title of Bao Nguyen’s Netflix documentary refers to the one-night recording of the famous, partially infamous “We Are the World” charity single of 1985 in which scores of celebrated musical recording artists gathered in Los Angeles to record a track drawing attention to the famine crippling Africa, which is why they christened their uber-supergroup, of sorts, as USA for Africa. Whether “We Are the World” made it good on its benevolent intentions is a question I cannot really answer in this review not least because the movie itself barely mounts a case as the song being a genuine force for good, just proffering a few broad statistics, boilerplate observations, and perhaps most revealingly, Kenny Loggins noting that he “wasn’t that aware of what was going on in Africa, but, at that time, whatever Michael (Jackson) did turned to gold.” No, given that Lionel Richie, the song’s co-writer along with Jackson, and driving force in its recording, functions as executive producer, “The Greatest Night in Pop” becomes a victory lap. And yet, if that slanted perspective naturally call this whole enterprise into question, the peek behind the curtain is so good, that it’s difficult not to come away entertained, if not also a little in awe that the whole thing happened in the first place.

For starters, did you know that “We Are the World” was recorded the same night as the 1985 American Music Awards? The same American Music Awards where Lionel Richie not only won seven times but hosted? Hosting an awards show is an exhausting process in and of itself and then afterwards Richie, exhausted, went to a recording studio and exhausted himself all over again by wrangling 50 of the biggest egos on the planet. That’s insanity. That’s like if after hosting the Academy Awards, Jimmy Kimmel went and tried to herd 50 standup comedians into recording a standup record to benefit [insert your preferred current global crisis here]. Maybe even more impressive than that, though, is how the song that Richie and Jackson wrote, and that crucially, Quincy Jones produced, never became a muddled mess but found a way to incorporate all those voices by utilizing their strengths in all the right places, effectively transforming pop music’s best and brightest into a genuine choir, and dispensing a compelling argument that made me reconsider my longtime blithe dismissal of the track.

Above all, “The Greatest Night in Pop” is a treasure trove of behind-the-scenes footage and more often than not, Nguyen makes the most of it. Not just in granting a figurative backstage pass with intimate glimpses of so many pop superstars just sort of milling around like hesitant kids on the first day of camp, but in demonstrating how “We Are the World” was much less lightning in a bottle than into the wee hours of the morning blood, sweat and tears. Bob Dylan, reduced to so many severe, sweaty close-ups, virtually drowns amongst his peers before rising to the occasion for his solo and the hero’s journey of Huey Lewis, to quote My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, when he is asked to pinch-hit as one part of a three-part melody for no-show Prince and becomes to this doc what Elaine Stritch was in trying to nail “The Ladies Who Lunch” in D.A. Pennebaker’s “Original Cast Album: Company” (1970). That direct cinema documentary utilized Pennebaker’s preferred fly on the wall approach, one that Nguyen rejects, preferring to interject all manner of talking head interviews, repeatedly yanking us back into the present. It’s not a wrong approach, really, frequently enjoyable, even insightful. And yet, it also comes to feel like something is being left on the table, layering an unmistakable sense of post factum varnish epitomizing “The Greatest Night in Pop” as a final accounting for the historical record rather than a living, breathing document of history as it is being written.